Mozilla Thunderbird 0.4 Released

Friday December 5th, 2003

Following two release candidates, the 0.4 release of Mozilla Thunderbird is now available. Thunderbird 0.4 features an updated look to Thunderbird's default theme, including a variety of new icons; better OS integration, cut and paste of images on Windows, and a number of bug fixes and other new features.

Anyhow, this new release is great as usual. I'd tried and stopped trying the 2 RCs before because of a bug with themes (the Smoke theme, more specifically), thinking it was something with the RCs instead. Turned out I had to fix my profile (I backed up and restored using Mozilla Backup - there are other ways, such as deleting your chrome/ directory) and all was well after that.

Actually, that's exactly what the alt attribute should be used for; here's the snippet from the W3C HTMl 4.01 specification: "alt %Text; #REQUIRED -- short description --", or in plain english: the alt attribute is a required (!) text attribute of the IMG tag which should provide a short description of the image.

"the alt attribute is a required (!) text attribute of the IMG tag which should provide a short description of the image."

You sound surprised that it's required. The alt text should be an alternative to the image, i.e. it should convey the same infomration of an image. So for the grpahic at the top of the Mozilla Thunderbird project page, the proper alt text would be "Thunderbird 0.3", seeing as it's really justa glorified title (for that reason the image should also be wrapped in the appropriate heading tag).

The alt text is supposed to be a description, as an alternative to the image, for text only browsers to display, or for visually impared users to be able to have spoken by text to voice conversion software, so that the idea conveyed by the image is available to people who, for one reason or another, cannot view the image.

I Completely agree.
The number one reason I am using M$ Outlook was that the icons for folders, etc., were revolting.
The onlt thing keeping me from switching over is the fact that I cannot edit messages in one of my folders like I can on M$ Outlook

I just followed the instructions on that page to get links to work in thunderbird. It was a not go. I am using Mandrake 9.1 with KDE. I added user_pref("network.protocol-handler.app.http", "/usr/lib/firebird/MozillaFirebird $s"); to my user.js for thunderbird. I verified I have the final thunderbird release and that /usr/lib/firebird/MozillaFirebird run from a console correctly runs Firebird. Can't get it to work.

The linux URL story would be much simpler if there were a standard way of detecting what app is supposed to handle a particular URI.... There isn't yet, though the freedesktop stuff is moving in that direction.

Indeed, that's the real problem with Linux right now: it's too disorganized. Sure, the kernel and X are pretty standard, but after that, just about anything goes (although two or three will be the only real choices - but they won't act the same way). Once software interaction (including (un)installs) is more standardized so organization can occur, Linux should really take off.

For now, tho, it's a fun way for me to amuse myself (and get CVS working - WinCVS never worked for me).

There's no reason why they couldn't hack it if they wanted to so that the other product launched via a hard-coded relative path, possibly configurable via about:config. There is zero need for a single monolithic process.

The Mozilla Suite should be a tightly integrated but de-coupled (!!) collection of independent apps that run in their own process space. Microsoft Office has no problems running in separate process spaces, and look how well integrated it is. KDE is a tightly integrated desktop environment, yet it doesn't force all it's apps in to one process space. The concept is just daft and was a huge architectual mistake by Netscape and then Mozilla.

When implemented properly, all the user should care about is that the right window appears when they click the right icon or URL - the rest should just be an implementation detail that the user need not care about. I want multiple processes so a crash in my browser doesn't kill the email I'm writing, and high CPU load in my email tool doesn't render my browser in operable. And no, threading doesn't cut it.

The ftp servers are already slow. Anyone mind posting a link to torrents of these files?

As an aside, I've found the mozilla ftp servers unbearably slow for weeks now. :-( Is it just me? Maybe, for advanced users, .torrents should be automatically made for all releases, at least for the first few days??? (In addition to the normal downloads, of course. :-)

The Qute theme is really nice for Firebird and Thunberbird, but wouldn't it be better if the throbber in some way was saying Firebird/Thunderbird much like the old Mozilla/Netcape and the IE throbbers that clue you into what app your using. Otherwise, you lose a lot of brand recognition. On the up side theme recognition is up, even though they are one and the same right now...

Any chance that Thunderbird will ever be able to access Netscape mail? I would like to make the jump to Firebird / Thunderbird but don't want to lose the ability to access my Netscape account. Sure you can access it in webmail, but it's just not as convenient.

Well you never know what may happen in the future, but for the moment access to Netscape mail is only possible with webmail or by using AOL/Netscape's proprietary and secret protocol, which they've only made available in Netscape-branded clients.

I was looking into this for a customer today and it isn't Thunderbird's fault. Eudora destroys every message it touches.

Basically, what it does is take a perfectly usable multi-part message, discard the plain text portion, and rewrite the HTML portion so that no other client can tell that it's supposed to be HTML. Other clients, such as Thunderbird, assume the message is plain text because there's nothing to indicate otherwise.

Well, the main task of an import filter is to convert application specific formats, isn't it?
It is not true that Eudora leaves no hint to indicate that the original message was sent in HTML-format (how would Eudora itself distinguish between text and HTML messages then?): Looking at an Eudora MBX file using a simple text editor, I can see the tags <x-html> and </x-html>. So in my amateurish opinion, the import filter just has to find those tags to find out, if the message was written in HTML and then add/replace the correct tags.
By the way, this import issue is also for me the only reason why I still use Eudora.